Shell – Strip // Comments From Files

$1 is a positional parameter; it will expand to the first argument passed to the script. There are similarly $2, $3...$9, ${10}, ${11},...

The special parameter "$@" will expand to a list of all the positional parameters.

So you can do the following:

sed -i 's/[ \t]*$//' "$@"

If you want to pass a glob/pattern to this script (or to any program), it must be escaped or quoted when you call the script - this is a function of the shell; it will expand any patterns before your script even sees it. This case shouldn't need that - the shell can expand the pattern, and the results of that expansion all get passed to sed.

Assuming you've got files named "news.articles1", "news.articles2", etc, and you've got your commonly-used words in a file named "stop.words"

cat news.articles* | tr -s '[:blank:]' '[\n*]' |
tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | fgrep -v -f stop.words 

The output of that pipeline ought to contain none of your commonly-used words. You may need to remove all punctuation with an additional step in the pipeline, like:

tr -d '[:punct:]'

A good English-language version of "stop.words" is often in /usr/share/groff/<version>/eign.